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Research Summaries

Using the drop-down menu below, read about highlighted scientific news for patients from ASCO's Annual Meetings, Symposia, and medical journals for the past three years. You can select a specific year, meeting or publication, and/or a specific topic, such as a type of cancer. Selecting "All" will take you to a complete list of articles that appear under all categories.

This includes ASCO’s Journal of Clinical Oncology and its scientific meetings, including the ASCO Annual Meeting, a five-day meeting held each May/June. To read the Annual Meeting summaries compiled into a yearly newsletter, you can also review Research Round Up: News for Patients from the ASCO Annual Meeting.Don’t forget to check out audio podcasts and videos about this news, as well. And a list of upcoming Symposia can be found here. And, in addition to the highlighted studies below, thousands of scientific abstracts are released each year at different ASCO meetings. To search the entire collection of meeting abstracts, visit ASCO's website.

A new study that analyzed data from more than 87,500 men with prostate cancer shows that the number diagnosed with higher-risk disease increased between 2011 and 2013. According to these results, the number of men diagnosed with either intermediate- or high-risk disease has increased by nearly 6% since 2011. These findings are interesting because in 2011 the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommended that PSA testing not be used for prostate cancer screening, regardless of a man’s age.

For many types of cancer, doctors are able to run laboratory tests to identify specific genes, proteins, and other factors unique to the tumor that help determine the best treatment option for each patient. However, there are currently no tests to help doctors select the best treatment option for men with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC).

After analyzing data from nearly 180,000 men collected in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database, researchers have found that the risk of developing prostate cancer is higher in men who have already had testicular cancer than those who have not.

A recent review of information from 145 patients with rectal cancer suggests that those who had no signs of cancer after receiving a combination of chemotherapy and radiation therapy could safely avoid or postpone surgery.

According to an analysis published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, patients and survivors who smoked prior to their cancer diagnosis had an up to five times higher risk of developing a second primary cancer than patients who never smoked.

One in three patients with cancer experiences anxiety or other mental health challenges, according to a study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. This is the largest and most comprehensive study to date assessing the mental and emotional health of patients with cancer using a standardized, diagnostic face-to-face interview.

New findings from a large group of patients from the national Prostate, Lung, Colorectal and Ovarian Cancer Screening Trial show that men who have a specific form of baldness – at both the front and crown of the head – at the age of 45 have a 40% increased risk of developing aggressive prostate cancer (usually indicates a faster growing tumor resulting in poorer prognosis, relative to “non-aggressive” prostate cancer) later in life, compared to men with no baldness at that age. However, the researchers did not find a link between any type of baldness and risk of non-aggressive prostate cancer.

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